In economics there is a long-standing debate on whether emerging markets should adopt a fixed exchange rate currency regime or leave their exchange rates up to markets to decide. Intuitively, exchange rate is just another price, similar to the price on a sack of potatoes, a liter of milk or a kilogram of honey. Except that exchange rate is the price of 1 unit of foreign currency (say, 1 US dollar) in terms of our domestic currency. Textbook economics would tell us that price flexibility is essential for markets to function well, to quickly clear up any s...

Whatever Kim Jong-un’s propaganda says about the greatness of his country, it is a fact that nobody immigrates to North Korea but almost everyone wants to get out. Likewise, whatever conservative Muslims say about the depraved West – there is a huge net migration out of Muslim countries into these rotten and decadent Western societies. And also the “socialist paradises” of the past had to take great efforts to make sure their lucky populations did not leave: the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 because the large-scale drainage of labor threatened Eastern Ge...

Spending a big chunk of their precious summer vacation in Armenia was not exactly my kids’ dream. Their wish list included far more exotic destinations in Africa, the Far East and Europe’s leading capitals – Vienna, Paris or London. And, yet, it did not take too much convincing for them to go on a one-week trial at TUMO’s summer school for creativity in Yerevan. All I had to do was show a few pictures from TUMO’s website:
What was supposed to be a one-week trial turned into a four-week immersion into the world of photography, 3D modeling and animation (...

The official visit of the Armenian President last week was concluded by a splashy announcement that the building of the “Friendship Bridge,” a new infrastructure project approved by the Georgian and Armenian Governments in late 2014, will start construction in 2017, and will be completed in under two years. The Georgian Prime Minister and the Armenian President have reportedly discussed a range of other opportunities to deepen economic and trade relationship between the two countries and support business community engagement in this process.
This excitem...

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence” – Aristotle
WHY STUDY HAPPINESS?
Already in ancient times philosophers debated the nature of happiness and the recipes for a happy and fulfilling life. Today this question is also hotly debated by scientists and politicians, who are particularly interested in what can be done to increase the happiness of their voters (and citizens, more generally). Happiness has become so important nowadays that four countries: Bhutan, Ecuador, UAE and Venezuela went so...

Negotiation support systems (NSS) let computers be brokers in multidimensional and highly complex negotiation problems. In the last 20 years, platforms like Smartsettle and Inspire were used in thousands of serious negotiation cases around the world, many of which were successfully resolved.
Some years ago, the first author of this article was involved in an attempt to use NSS for settling a dispute between the Israeli government, which wanted to shut down one of its departments, and a labor union, which represented the employees who were affected. The m...

ReforMeter

Most popular blogs

When thinking of “market distortions” we typically imagine government regulations, taxes and subsidies that prevent market mechanisms from achieving an optimal outcome. For example, if you pay $100 f...

In March 2015, 31-year-old Tamar Trapaidze died of severe toxicity in Italy. Like many Georgian women of her generation, Tamar was an illegal immigrant employed as an in-home care worker by an Italia...

The first tea bushes appeared in Western Georgia in 1847, and since then tea production has played a significant, yet widely unknown, role in Georgia’s history. The humid and subtropical climate of W...